On Sun, Feb 24, 2013 at 4:57 PM, Karam Qubsi <karamqubsi@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all ,
> we are planing to complete the translation of dspace to Arabic and we have
> some questions :
> 1- the attached file "Messages_ar.properties" translated by Um Al-Qura
> University( more information here http://uqu.edu.sa/lib/ar/173363 )
> and I think they translated it for dspace 1.6 , so the question here is
this
> file work for dspace 3.1 ?

Hi Karam,

although the file would work, only some of the messages would be
translated. You need to update it with the new messages up to 3.0.

> 2- is this file useful for translating the xmlui user interface or can be
> used some way to make that procedure easier ?

No, the Messages.properties file is for JSPUI and messages common for all
interfaces. messages.xml is the one for XMLUI, with several smaller
messages.xml files for optional modules - most importantly Discovery. They
have separate message files but you can include the translated strings
directly in the main messages.xml file and it will work.

Here are the 3.0 files, you can click the "Raw" button to download them:

> 4- we feel that there are some words we need to modify and the file use I
> think Unicode characters like :
> browse.et-al = \u0623\u062e\u0631\u0649
> and I think this is not familiar to our translators to work with
> I guess there is someway to translate it to the normal Arabic then convert
> the characters to Unicode " any Ideas about this ? "

The .properties files are encoded in ASCII (so the non-ASCII characters are
all encoded using escape sequences). You can use the native2ascii tool (I
think it comes with JDK) to convert in both directions. So:
1) convert the 1.6 file:
native2ascii -reverse Messages_ar.properties Messages_ar.properties.utf8
2) translate the missing messages
3) convert the translated file to ASCII to make DSpace display it properly:
native2ascii Messages_ar.properties.utf8 Messages_ar.properties

> Thanks A lot for you all
> Hop you help us and we will share our work with the community as soon as
we
> can when we complete this

I want to ask about dspace manuals .
is the manuals here use "docbook" format ?
so that is easy to translate by converting it to pot then re-converting it
to xml ...
we test this way in translating koha manuals to Arabic here :http://es.koha-community.org/manual/

I'm not sure if the manuals for dspace are the same ( use docbook format)

if it is please guide me to find the xml files (in docbook format )

or if it based on other format tell us if there is some one have any ideas
how to translate them

Unfortunately, they're no longer in DocBook since 1.7 [1]. They're on
the wiki [1] and can be exported in the Confluence format [2]. You can
create corresponding translated pages and subpages in the DSPACE
namespace on the wiki. The manual is rather large (as you can see from
the number of pages in the PDF export), so be prepared for a lot of
work.